First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Neighborhood Ninjas

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You know that really annoying mental clock in the back of your mind that insists on mapping your life down to the minute? 

No?  Huh.  Maybe that’s just one of my obnoxious habits.

I’m always racing time.  I tell myself it’s just to get the most out of my day, but it probably has more to do with my fear of wasting it.  (And maybe my annoying attempts to control…everything?)  You know, while we’re being honest. 

So here I am, ten and a half minutes before work.  I’m actually on time and dressed and in the car with both my shoes on. 

And about to run into a mile of construction.

Mental memo: The mental clock is really ticked. 

I know there used to be a street here. 
And who put up that annoying roadblock?
Do you think I’ll fit between the bulldozers and that makeshift outhouse?
I should really just park here and walk.

I don’t know what it is that makes me keep driving.  (Probably not wanting to march past twenty workers in full martial arts attire?  With training gear and weapons prodding from my backpack?)  Or maybe I’m Just. That. Stubborn.

Which is why I find myself wedged somewhere between a ditch and a cement truck.

Mental memo: construction guys get kind of mad when you try to sneak past bulldozers in a seven-person car. 

Maybe even as mad as my mental clock.

But I have class in three minutes.  Can’t you just pause for a moment??  Pull that truck onto the grass or something?

Kind of a lost cause.  And I’m too far in to even find a place to park. 

Somehow I turn the car around, berating the lost time and the fact that I’ll be late and that I’ll now have to sprint to work past twenty-some construction men in full taekwondo regalia.  I mean, I’m too old to be running around town like the neighborhood ninja! 

So I trudge back down the block looking for something resembling a street that I can part on… And, on that trip back, I run into every one of that day’s students.  All just as stuck as I, with young kids in the car and no way to keep driving.

Alright then, I tell their parents.  It seems I’m walking anyway.  I’ll just take them with me. 

Which is how we came to parade – me with all my little ninjas, decked out in our best taekwondo attire – past three bulldozers, twenty some construction workers and some very confused onlookers. 

And I realized that, if I’d listened to my annoying inner clock, I would have actually made it to work on time.  And I would have been the only one, because each one of my students would have gotten stuck and gone back home.

We don’t need to control every aspect of our lives.  We just need to live them.  Take that clock down from the wall, and trust that these things happen for the better. 
Sometimes you just can’t see it from behind the bulldozers.
           
And here’s a little bonus: I got to make this awesome statement.

Yes, I know I’m too old to be running around town like the neighborhood ninja.  And yes I know you’re staring, all twenty-some of you. 

Well, I hope you’re inspired.  

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 23, 2014 at 3:57 PM

    Love the story! It just goes to show that everything happens for a reason.

    ReplyDelete

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